News

Morbid Conditions in the Sister Study Cohort

Published on
February 12th, 2018

SSS health researchers M. Elizabeth Hodgson (first author), Whitney Arroyave, Sandra Deming-Halverson, and Aimee D’Aloisio were among the authors of a poster at the 2017 American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting. The Sister Study: Morbid Conditions at Enrollment in a Breast Cancer Cohort described a comparison of demographic, lifestyle, and selected self-reported morbid conditions between 50,884 Sister Study participants and women in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a representative sample of the U.S. population. Although Sister Study participants do differ in some respects from the NHANES population, as would be expected in a volunteer cohort, overall they are similar to U.S. women of the same race, age, and socioeconomic level. The cohort is a unique and well-characterized resource, suitable for research on the incidence of a number of chronic conditions in addition to breast cancer. The poster was coauthored with the Sister Study’s principal investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.